Are You Kidding?

What if you could be happy, healthy, have great relationships,
and even reduce your chance of getting a heart attack by as much as
50%, just by adopting the following lifestyle guidelines?

1. Smoke old-fashioned Italian stogie cigars (with an extremely high level of nicotine) 2. Eat plenty of hard and soft cheeses, and fry your sausages and meatballs in lard 3. Work in dangerous slate quarries where you inhale a variety of toxic substances

If you had been living in Roseto, Pennsylvania during the mid 20th
century, you might very well have followed this lifestyle “regime,”and
lived a long, happy, and healthy life, enjoying an abundance of
fulfilling relationships.

If you’re scratching your head in confusion or disbelief right now,
you’re right – it doesn’t make any sense. Actually, your health and
happiness wouldn’t have been because of this lifestyle – but rather in
spite of it. There’s one critical ingredient of that lifestyle that we
left out.

Before we tell you what it is, we just want to take a
moment to place this “most important page” within the larger context of
the website.

Change Can Be Hard

We’ve said on our home page, and throughout the site, that there’s one
thing that can change everything in your life – and that one thing is
“remembering to breathe.” We use “remembering to breathe” as a kind of
shorthand way of saying that

when you make a habit of p a u s i n g from time to time in the midst of whatever you’re doing to attune yourself to the calm, ease, and contentment of your core, everything in your life can feel lighter, smoother and more joyful.

Sometimes,
you just have to remember that the core is there in order to get a
taste of its calm and contentment. But in
the beginning, most people need to practice some techniques for a while to help create new
habits that make the core more accessible. You can learn those techniques in the Techniques section of the site.

In the
Brain Pages of the site, you can learn about exciting new discoveries in the
field of neuroscience that explain why those techniques are effective in
changing your brain and changing your life.

But knowing the techniques and having the understanding and encouragement that the
brain science provides, aren't always enough to make a difference. If you’ve ever tried to change the way you eat,
start an exercise program, or practice a new skill, you know it’s hard
to have the discipline it takes to make the kind of lasting
changes you're looking for. And it can be even harder to
change things like work habits or how we relate to other people.

The Missing Critical Ingredient

There’s now a great deal of research showing that for the vast
majority of people, one of the single most powerful factors that
determines whether or not they will succeed in their efforts at personal
change, is social support – a sense of connection, caring, and shared intention with other people.

Or to put it really simply, the most powerful lever for change is people helping each other to make healthier, more constructive choices.

Social “Unsupport”

One of the things that makes changing so difficult is that there
is so much “support” in our environment for unhealthy choices. For one
thing, we’re constantly exposed to advertising that goads us – with
promises of pleasure, happiness, or greater sex appeal – to follow our
cravings and desires over choosing things that would be good for our
health, our budget, or our overall sense of balance and well-being.

There
have also been a lot of studies showing the powerful effect of peer
pressure on a wide range of behaviors – from
how we choose to eat, sleep, exercise, and spend money, to the amount of effort
we make to conserve energy, to the way we treat others.

You may find it
surprising – even a bit disturbing – to hear that the thing which seems
to most influence these behaviors is what we think our peers, neighbors,
or others with whom we identify, are doing.

Social Influence and the Brain

On the Interpersonal Integration page, we talk about what’s been
called the “social brain” – the part of our brain that attunes us to
what others are experiencing. In particular, we mentioned "mirror
neurons," whose job it is to literally create in our own bodies the
inclination to do what we perceive someone else to be doing.

When
we see someone yawning, our mirror neurons cause us to yawn. When we
see someone drinking, our mirror neurons make us thirsty and prepare us
to drink. When we see someone eating a waffle cone with two scoops of
our favorite ice cream, or downing an order of crispy french fries, our
mirror neurons cause our mouths to water and prepare our bodies to
indulge.

The discovery of mirror neurons helps us understand the
basis for recent research findings which show that people are more likely
to gain weight when their friends are overweight or when the people
they hang out with start to put on weight.

Whether we
realize it or not, and whether we like it or not, in a very tangible
way, we are always influencing each other’s behaviors – for better and
for worse.

Back to Roseto

So if it wasn’t the cigars, the lard, and the toxic chemicals that were
responsible for the long, healthy, and happy lives of Rosetans, what was
it?

In the mid-1960s, a physician who had worked for years in
both Roseto and the nearby town of Bangor, was having a beer with the
head of medicine from the University of Oklahoma. In the course of their
conversation, the physician mentioned he was puzzled by the fact that
the residents of Roseto seemed to have far fewer heart attacks than
those of Bangor, and he couldn’t see any reason why this would be the
case.

Apparently, he wasn’t the only one who was curious. Soon
after, a massive study of the community was undertaken. When all
factors had been weighed (including genetic differences), one stood out
more than any other.

The critical factor was a strong sense of
community which provided powerful social support for everyone – from the
youngest children to the most elderly members of the community.

The elders were given a special status as mediators for common everyday problems of the community.

There was a strong community norm preventing those with more money from flaunting it.

In bad times, everyone knew that the community would come to their aid.

The crime rate was zero.

According to Stuart Wolf, one of the physicians who studied the Roseto community,

“People [there] are nourished by other people.”

A
growing number of studies are now showing that this feeling of being
“nourished” by others is so powerful, that it can make us healthier,
happier, and even prolong our lives.

Of course, the point of the
Roseto story is not that if you live in a supportive community you can
eat all the junk food you want, never exercise, indulge in a variety of
bad habits, and still expect to be healthy and happy. But Roseto does
show us that a sense of community can be so powerful that, at least to
some extent, it can counter the effects of bad dietary habits, nicotine,
and an unhealthy work environment. However, in most of the communities
that have been studied, the sense of belonging, meaning, and purpose
seems to go hand-in-hand with eating well, being active, and living an
all around healthy lifestyle.

The Fate of Community

Some observers of the Roseto community had predicted, as early as the
mid-1960s, that as modern life caused the residents to abandon
their close-knit culture, the health and
happiness of the community would decline.

And this is indeed what
happened. As far as can be determined by records kept over many years,
the first time a resident of Roseto under 45 years of age had a heart
attack was in 1971. Other illnesses increased, as did the crime rate.
People began to focus more on achieving greater status, and less on
building community. The taboo against flaunting one’s wealth was gone.
Houses grew larger and children played outside less often. A former Roseto resident who had moved to a modern city expressed the change this way: “I’m sorry we moved. Everything here is modern. I have everything I need – except people.”

An
interesting symbol of change was the fact that in 1985, the Roseto town
concert band, which had been founded way back in 1890, for the first
time in its 95-year history, asked to be paid for playing at the local
church’s yearly festival.

Similar
trends have been seen in a number of other formerly close, tight-knit
communities. As support systems come apart, there’s more depression,
more wealth inequality, crime rates go up, and people’s health
deteriorates.

So, what to do?

Blue Zones:Supportive Environments for Well-Being

“For people to adopt a healthful lifestyle, I have become convinced,
they need to live in an ‘ecosystem’, so to speak, that makes it
possible. As soon as you take culture, belonging, [or] purpose… out of
the picture, the foundation for long healthy lives collapses.” Dan Buettner

Over the last several decades, journalist Dan Buettner has investigated a
number of communities around the world where people have been living
active, healthy lives well into their 90s, and in some cases, even into
their 100s.

His investigations, corroborated by numerous medical
studies, have found that strong social support may be, if not the most
important factor, one of the most important factors in the unusual
longevity of communities as far-flung as Okinawa, Japan, Costa Rica’s
Nicoyan Peninsula, and a group of Seventh Day Adventists in Loma Linda,
CA.

In 2000, Buettner’s associates, Dr. Gianni Pes of the University of
Sassari in Italy, and Dr. Michel Poulain, a Belgian demographer,
identified the Nuoro province of Sardinia as having the highest
concentration in the world of men over 100. To designate the area, they
drew a blue line on a map around a particular cluster of villages.
Thereafter, the term “blue zone” came to be used to describe communities
of surpassing longevity and well-being.

Buettner and his colleagues have located a number of these zones
around the world, and are exploring ways in which other communities
might learn and benefit from their discoveries.

Scientists are discovering that we’re
connected in many rather surprising ways.

When two people are deep in
conversation, feeling very connected, their brain waves become
synchronized. Electro-magnetic fields emanating from their hearts
overlap.

You can read more about these connections in the Heartfulness section of the Meditation page.

Do-it-Yourself Blue Zones

It turns out we don’t have to be fortunate enough to have been
born into one of the world’s natural blue zones. We can create our own
“ecosystems,” as Buettner calls them, to support us in living healthy,
happy, meaningful lives.

And blue zones don’t need to
be an entire community. For some people, one or two supportive friends
or family members will do the job. For others, an online forum may be
all they need. Still others may be fine with some video and audio
support – and perhaps someone to share them with. The point is everyone
will have their own way of creating a supportive ecosystem.

Before starting to work with the practices on this site, we strongly
encourage you to think about what kind of supportive “ecosystem” you
have, and what kind you may need to help you make the changes you want
to make in your life.

For inspiration, we collected
stories of some highly successful blue zones around the globe. Some of
these were developed by people in desperate situations – plagued by
poverty, hunger, or violence – who, nevertheless, managed to transform
their lives and communities, often with very little in the way of
material resources. We'll be adding pages with their stories in the near future.We hope their stories will inspire you.

The Ultimate Blue Zone

One could say that the essential message of this website is that the ultimate “blue zone” is not something in our outer environment, but the core of peace, calm, contentment, and deep sense of connection to others that exists within ourselves. No matter where we are, no matter how difficult things may appear to be, we always – potentially – have access to our inner core.

We italicize “potentially” because there are so many factors in the environment that work against our ability to be in touch with our core.

The more outer support we have, the stronger and more meaningful our “ecosystem,” the easier it will be to live a healthy, joyful, meaningful life, centered in our core.

The more we're centered in the core, the less we’ll need the outer support, and the more we’ll be naturally inclined to support others in living a balanced, harmonious, well-integrated, and meaningful life, centered in their core.

You can start small. If at the moment you don’t have much in the way of support, you can start by using this website. Or if this one doesn’t work for you, find another one. Find a book, a piece of music, a beautiful place in nature, a friend or family member – just something or someone that feels supportive of the experience of calm, ease, and contentment that is native to your core.

Once you start looking for support – and even more powerful – once you start looking for ways to provide support for others, you may be amazed to discover different varieties of “blue zones” all around you – things you never knew about or noticed before, plentiful opportunities to connect, and abundant ways for you to offer your own contributions and unique gifts.

“To laugh much; to win respect of intelligent persons and the affections
of children; to hear the approbation of honest critics and endure the
betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty; to find the best in
others; to give one’s self; to leave the world a little better, whether
by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition; to
have played and laughed with enthusiasm, and sung with exultation; to
know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived, this is
to have succeeded.”